"Our poverty is a world full of dreams:" Reforming the World Bank

Global Governance

Volumn 11, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 369-388

  Weaver, Catherine ^a   Leiteritz, Ralf J ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS   (United States)

^b UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES   (Colombia)

Author keywords

James Wolfensohn; Organizational culture; Organizational reform; Strategic Compact; World Bank

Indexed keywords

EID: 24644479719     PISSN: 10752846     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/19426720-01103007     Document Type: Review

References (57)

1. The official motto of the World Bank Group reads: "Our Dream is a World Free of Poverty."
2. Alex Wilks, "Overstretched and Underloved: World Bank Faces Strategy Decisions," Bretton Woods Project, available online at www.brettonwoodsproject.org/article.shtml?cmd[126]=x-126-4415 (accessed 15 February 2001).
3. See Jessica Einhorn, "The World Bank's Mission Creep," Foreign Affairs 80, no. 5 (2001),
4. and Stephen Fidler, "Who's Minding the bank?" Foreign Policy 126 (September-October 2001).
5. Composed of five institutions, the World Bank Group currently has 183 member states, a total permanent staff of around 8,500 in its Washington, D.C. headquarters and its 107 mission offices, and a cumulative committed portfolio of well over $500 billion in outstanding loans, grants, and guarantees; see World Bank Annual Report 2003 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank), p. 8.
6. Daniel L. Nielson and Michael J. Tierney, "Delegations to International Organizations: Agency Theory and World Bank Environmental Reform," International Organization 57, no. 2 (April 2003), pp. 241-276.
7. Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).
8. Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).
9. Cf. Chris Argyris and Donald A. Schön, Organizational Learning (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1978);
10. Nils Brunsson, The Organization of Hypocrisy: Talk, Decisions and Actions in Organizations (New York: John Wiley, 1989);
11. and Edgar H. Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992).
12. The dominating role of the United States is crucial here. See Devesh Kapur, "The Changing Anatomy of Governance of the World Bank," in Jonathan R. Pincus and Jeffrey A. Winters, eds., Reinventing the World Bank (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 63-67;
13. and Ngaire Woods, "The United States and the International Financial Institutions: Power and Influence Within the World Bank and the IMF," in Rosemary Foot, S. Neil MacFarlane, and Michael Mastanduno, eds., US Hegemony and International Organisations: The United States and Multilateral Institutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 92-114.
14. Between 1990 and 2000, absolute levels of total official development assistance (ODA) stayed the same, at around $53 billion, whereas ODA as a percentage of GNP fell from 0.33 percent to 0.22 percent. OECD, International Development Statistics 2001, available online at www.oecd.org/dac (accessed 15 September 2001).
15. Joseph E. Stiglitz, "The World Bank at the Millennium," Economic Journal 109 (November 1999);
16. and Andy Storey, "The World Bank, Neoliberalism, and Power: Discourse Analysis and Implications for Campaigners," Development in Practice 10, no. 3/4 (2000).
17. World Bank, Assessment of the Strategic Compact (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 13 March 2001), p. 1, available online at www.worldbank.org/html/extdr/ strategypapers/assessment.pdf (accessed 30 March 2004).
18. International Financial Institution Advisory Commission, Final Report, available online at www.house.gov/jec/imf/meltzer.htm (accessed 16 December 2003).
19. Cf. Sebastian Mallaby, "NGOs: Fighting Poverty, Hurting the Poor," Foreign Policy 144 (September-October 2004).
20. Cf. Dana Clark, Jonathan Fox, and Kay Treakle, Demanding Account-ability: Civil-Society Claims and the World Bank (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
21. Portfolio Management Task Force, Effective Implementation: Key to Development Impact (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1992), p. 9.
22. Effective Implementation: Key to Development Impact, Ibid., pp. 14-16.
23. Effective Implementation: Key to Development Impact, Ibid., p. 17.
24. Bruce Rich, "The World Bank Under James Wolfensohn," in Pincus and Winters, Reinventing the World Bank, pp. 26-53.
25. Kapur, "The Changing Anatomy of Governance of the World Bank," p. 60.
26. World Bank, The Strategic Compact: Renewing the Bank's Effectiveness to Fight Poverty (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 13 February 1997), p. 1.
27. World Bank, Assessment of the Strategic Compact, Annex 1, p. 7.
28. World Bank, Strategic Compact Assessment: Informal Meeting with Executive Directors, 13 December 2000, Washington, D.C. (on file with authors).
29. Strategic Compact Assessment: Informal Meeting with Executive Directors, Ibid., p. 6.
30. World Bank, Assessment of the Strategic Compact, p. 54.
31. Assessment of the Strategic Compact, Ibid., Annex 8, pp. 16-17.
32. Interview with Kay Treakle, executive director of the Bank Information Center, 31 January 2002, Washington, D.C.
33. Operations Evaluation Department, OED Review of the Bank's Performance on the Environment (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2001).
34. OED Review of the Bank's Performance on the Environment, Ibid
35. World Bank, Assessment of the Strategic Compact, p. 18.
36. Quality Assurance Group, Annual Report on Portfolio Performance, Fiscal Year 2001 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2001), p. 16 (on file with authors).
37. World Bank, Assessment of the Strategic Compact, p. 18.
38. See also Robert Hunter Wade, "The Third Bomb: Qinghai (China) and the Inspection Panel," London School of Economics, March 2003 (manuscript).
39. Quality Assurance Group, Annual Report on Portfolio Performance, p. 14.
40. Operations Evaluation Department, Annual Review of Development Effectiveness 2001: Making Choices (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2002), p. 9.
41. Quality Assurance Group, Annual Report on Portfolio Performance, p. 24.
42. Operations Evaluation Department, Annual Review of Development Effectiveness 2001, table 7.
43. Bank Information Center, "The Wolfensohn Revolution - Supervision and Incentives for Ensuring Results," Issues Briefing, September 2001.
44. Ernst B. Haas, When Knowledge Is Power: Three Models of Change in International Organizations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990);
45. and Peter A. Hall, "Policy Paradigms, Social Learning and the State: The Case of Economic Policy Making in Britain," Comparative Politics 25, no. 3 (April 1993): 275-296.
46. Nicholas Stern and Francisco Ferreira, "The World Bank as an 'Intellectual Actor,'" in Devesh Kapur, John P. Lewis, and Richard Webb, eds., The World Bank: Its First Half Century (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1997), pp. 523-609.
47. Michael M. Cernea, "Social Organization and Development Anthropology: The 1995 Malinowski Award Lecture," Environmentally Sustainable Development Studies and Monograph Series (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1995), p. 15.
48. Anthony Bebbington, Scott Guggenheim, Elizabeth Olson, and Michael Woolcock, "Exploring Social Capital Debates at the World Bank," Journal of Development Studies 40, no. 5 (June 2004): 33-64.
49. Anthony Bebbington, "Social Capital/Social Development/SDV," available online at http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/essd/sdvext.nsf/62ByDocName/ SocialCapitalandSocialDevelopmentinSDV/$FILE/Bebbington1.pdf (accessed 24 September 2004).
50. Desmond McNeill, "Interdisciplinarity and Sustainable Development Policy: What Have We Learned?" Presentation at the World Bank, 3 December 2001, p. 6 (on file with authors).
51. Consider the (partially forced) resignations of Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz; the lead author of the 2000 World Development Report, Ravi Kanbur; and William Easterly, a senior staff member in the Development Research Department. For a discussion of the first two cases,
52. see Robert Hunter Wade, "US Hegemony and the World Bank: The Fight over People and Ideas," Review of International Political Economy 9, no. 2 (May 2002): 215-243.
53. Luiz A. Pereira da Silva, "The International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and the Political Lessons from the Asian Crises of 1997-1998," International Social Science Journal, no. 170 (December 2001): 562.
54. World Bank, Assessment of the Strategic Compact, p. 44.
55. Bank lending in social and environmental development did rise dramatically during the Compact period. Seen from this vantage point, the Bank has undoubtedly been responsive to external demands. However, going beyond measurable indicators of change involving deeply held beliefs and operating procedures has proven more elusive. This also applies to the national counter-parts with whom the Bank is working. For example, a recent survey among Bank country directors found that 63 percent report that client governments are less intensively interested in confronting social problems in Bank-financed projects. As a result, Bank staff struggle to convince national governments of the benefits of social development-for example, stakeholder participation. See World Bank, An OED Review of Social Development in Bank Activities (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2004), p. viii.
56. Barnett and Finnemore, Rules for the World.
57. This apparent shortcoming is related to the preference for constitutive ("how possible") as opposed to causal ("why") explanations in social construetivist epistemology. See Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 77-89.